For My Mother by May Sarton Once more I summon you Out of the past With poignant love, You who nourished the poet And the lover. I see your gray eyes Looking out to sea In those Rockport summers, Keeping a distance Within the closeness Which was never intrusive Opening out Into the world. And what…
Vicki Boykis’ excellent article on every aspect of ‘Data Science’ I can think of: a little history, employment prospects, skills, education, and continuous learning. It would appear that more than half the job, at least, is wrangling (replicating, cleaning, imputing, transferring, understanding, aug…
Peter Norvig: (How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python)). See also: HyLang. Looks super cool and always makes me wonder if anyone’s ever used it in production.…
Back in the second century BC, Cato the Elder ended his speeches with the phrase ‘Carthago delenda est,’ which is to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed.’ It didn’t matter what the ostensible topic of the speech was: above all, Carthage must be destroyed. My opinion towards JavaScript is much like Cat…
Tyler Vigen maintains around 30,000 examples of “spurious correlations” (also available in book form). For instance: You can also “discover” your own. Like this one…
At least in Civilization: [. . .] Gandhi tends to be the first to use nuclear weapons, and spares no expense on wiping your civilization off the map. You probably always thought you were crazy — how could a series that prides itself on historical accuracy portray Gandhi so wrong? Well, you’ll be ha…
This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole. Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source) https://vi…
Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when yo…
Expression Real Distance Next door 1 - 2 miles Right up the road 5 - 10 miles Up North 15 - 100 miles A couple miles 10 - 20 miles Not too far 20 - 50 minutes A little ways Over an hour A pretty good drive 2 hours+ Drive down there Literally any direction Can attest 😆. Via.…
Via GLP, a University Title Generator that generates “prestigious” titles and associated salaries. A few random gems Associate Coordinator of the Subcommittee for Community Services Deputy Vice President of the Office of Alumni Planning Provost for the Subcommittee for Investor Diversity Vice Chair…
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. – Conrad, Heart of Darkness (taken completely out of context…)…
Amar Bose on education, teaching, purpose, creativity, not whinging, Norbert Weiner (under whom he was a grad student), and working with the right (and ethical) people. Starts around 24:00. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySAXW-7WrDg…
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them. – Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Obje…
As the final season of HBO’s blockbuster television series Game of Thrones hits screens around the world today, audiences in China are begging for the explicit scenes of sex and violence not to be censored. [. . .] Disgruntled viewers in China have previously compared the significantly edited versi…
Ramin Nazer on some models he entertains of what happens to us after we die. A few of my favorites…
Brilliant, beautiful.…
Best thing I’ve seen this year. About as spiritual as it gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA After an unimaginable length of time, even the black holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons, gradually tending towards the same temperature, as the ex…
Found screenshots of a beautiful vintage theme I’d installed on my iPhone 5 via Cydia when I was stupid enough to jailbreak my phone. Wish I could still use it though 😍…
via /r/desmoines. Source unknown.…
Garrett Whisten made a most amazing CVS receipt generator (cached). He even wrote a scraper that gets real product names off their website 🙏 🙌…
Does The Dog Die? is a publicly curated database of sensitive, “emotional spoilers” for books, movies, TV, and many more categories. Unconsenting Media is a similar database of “sexual violence in broadcasting”.…
A delightful, 20-minute video from the Hamilton Watch Company1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL0_vOw6eCc and a tl;dw version of the above Bought one after looking to get the “Murph Watch” in Interstellar. That article notes that they only made 10 for the movie (and gave one away.) Well, they’re of…
A few favorites from a selection of Kenny Shopsin’s infinite wisdom. He ran this diner (which doesn’t really sound like one…) On ambition It’s just an initiation into the idea until the abilities to appreciate life forthe moments in a row starts to make you a deeper and more fulfilled person, and t…
Witch is cmd + tab on steroids.…
A pure CSS still life by Ben Evans who appears to be working on an online story with pure CSS illustrations as well. Via Deepu.…
All Yesterdays is an exploration of things we know we will never know about “dinosaurs and prehistoric animals” . Jonathan Wojcik at bogleech.com has an excellent review of the book. Of particular interest: We know little-to-nothing about the creatures’ anatomies and morphologies because of missing…
Makes amazing sculptures. See the ones of Freddie Mercury and Doc Brown posted on social media quite often. Has an active YouTube channel.…
Cached a list of CNN-IBN’s list of “the 100 Greatest Indian Films of All Time” for later perusal because the source website is cancer.…
Gave Hugo a try and was quite impressed by the ease and speed. The official documentation kinda sucks at introducing key ideas (like taxonomies) in a gradual way that’s helpful to newcomers, but is great for variable and function references. Found these two posts very helpful. Here’s another that ex…
makes absolutely mesmerizing cyberpunky, vaporwavey 3D art.…
The Des Moines Register on how to send them email in (I’m guessing) the late 80s/early 90s. An article on how Baud Rate isn’t the same as Bit Rate Baud rate refers to the number of signal or symbol changes that occur per second. A symbol is one of several voltage, frequency, or phase changes. NRZ…
Can’t Unsee is “Spot the difference” for UI nerds. 6530. On the “hard” sections, wondered how much the minutiae matter if a user is unable to discern the difference between two comps after a few seconds. Via Deepu…
I think my job doesn’t have an end goal. Words like “finished” or “complete” don’t exist. We do our best with today’s menu and entertain our guests. That’s all for today, it’s repetition. – Chef Nozumu Abe, Sushi Noz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wAQxJeyyXo…
In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under constructio…
In programming, it is also common to refer to the “NIH syndrome” as the tendency towards reinventing the wheel (reimplementing something that is already available) based on the belief that in-house developments are inherently better suited, more secure, more controlled, quicker to develop, and incu…
By John Atkinson…
Set to “Destino” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV40xyl9bRA 💗💗💗…
A highly configurable, free-for-private-use typeface…
Oh how I love a good David Mitchell rant. This one’s on avoiding taxation via pension contributions: [. . . ] what we’re essentially saying is that people get to choose, if they’re rich, how much they reckon they out to pay. Where on this moral scale do they place themselves, what can they square w…
NPR on why many of us can identify with little Agnes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SI6rhotAkE The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the more…
Shturmovshchina was a common Soviet work practice of frantic and overtime work at the end of a planning period in order to fulfill the planned production target. The practice usually gave rise to products of poor quality at the end of a planning cycle. It has three very, very familiar stages Spi…
This is absolutely beautiful. I’m happy there’s a way to generate music that sounds like one of my favorite tracks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYvHwyjUGFg…
'Posting’ in the pen world refers to what you do with your pen cap while you write [. . .] when you put the cap on the back of the pen while you write, regardless of whether it pushes on or screws on with threads. and [. . .] what do you do with the cap? Do you put it on the desk? Hold it in your…
Dijkstra on why numbering should start from zero. Numbering is done with natural numbers. Let’s take zero to be the smallest natural number1. For the sequence (2, 3, 4, … ,12), using the convention (2 ≤ n < 13) is appropriate because For a sequence starting with zero, like (0, 1, 2, 3), the left…
by Kawanabe Kyosai, Kyosai rakuga1, 1881. More of his stuff here. As far as band names go, “Hell Courtesan” is metal as fuck. “Kyosai’s Drawings for Pleasure”↩︎…
An interactive model of the office from The Office 😍…
You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backwar…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOXULpUpR08 Heard this and was made aware of this timeless album for the first time at a very strange party at Iowa State. RIP Sam Zaman.…
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Lawdamercy…
by Dani Donovan…
For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder: Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place. […] core-js is also utils library, qui…
Megan Garber for The Atlantic This week, as the allegations against Tyson were gaining attention in the American media, Bloomberg published a report about the men of Wall Street and how they have decided to address the revealed abuses of #MeToo. “No more dinners with female colleagues” is one solut…
The original comic…
Advent of Code (via BE, 25 challenges.) The Elevator Saga (via co-worker, 18 challenges.)…
Inter UI looks beautiful, comes in all sorts of weights, has thousands of glyphs, and is free 💗 (via Arun Venkatesan’s blog.) Source…
Vulture’s 2018 Guide to Soundcloud Rappers wherein they’re classified by name: “The Lil’s” (Lil Pump/Xan/Skies/Wop/Yachty/Uzi Vert/Peep), “The Adjectives”, “The Creative Spellers”, and “The (Almost) Full Sentences”. I’ll take this one.…
ExecutedToday.com has been publishing “the story of an historical execution that took place on this date, and the story behind it” since October 2007. The death penalty, as a subset within that vast category of “acts of violence homo sapiens do to their fellows,” blends insensibly into a dozen adja…
Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology: Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these thing…
Ross Pomeroy for RealClearScience, “What’s the Most Efficient Language?” [. . .] travel the world and record at least a dozen speakers of every language reading those passages aloud at their normal cadence. Count the overall number of syllables used for each passage and measure the time it took sub…
From Soutik Biswas’, “The Simpsons: Not all Indians think Apu is a racist stereotype” “As I see it, there are two primary products that second generation Indian American comedians sell - the ridiculousness of their parents’ ‘culture’ (arranged marriage and ‘my son, the doctor’ are the commonest tro…
We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unus…
Minute Physics on how Muons reaching terrestrial detectors from the upper atmosphere are direct proof of time dilation/length contraction in Special Relativity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVzDP8SMhPo What a Boss 🙏 💯…
Mr. Thomas and the photographer Emily Shur rented a home in Los Angeles for a weekend in May. There, they shot several images that harked back to Mr. Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want,” one in a series of four paintings inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to Congress celebrating America’s f…
Roel Nieskens “leveraged the synergy of ligatures” to create a free typeface called Sans Bullshit Sans. It turns this The value proposition of our agile mindset and scrum methodology is to enable the emergence of disruptive, convergent, crowdsourced platforms that allow our clients to lean in and e…
By Mike Medaglia who’s published an illustrated guide to mindfulness 🙏…
As if I needed another reason to fall in love with Tilda Swinton Swinton penned a phony IMDb biography to keep the secret, and wore fake genitalia, created by makeup artist Mark Coulier, while in character. (“She did have us make a penis and balls,” Coulier told the paper. “She had this nice, weigh…
Ankeny or Saudi Arabia? If you had to choose one to live in, which would you pick? Depends. One is full of religious wackos, and the other one is in a desert. – /r/desmoines…
Behold the beautiful Secretarybird 🙌 – Source Unknown Way out of other birds’ leagues, eats venomous snakes, and “appears on the coats of arms of Sudan and South Africa” 🔥…
Designed by Pininfarina all the way back in 1970 (!) 😍 🤤…
In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achievin…
Tech Yaks ranks and lists good tech talks. Some awesome stuff on there, like one of my favorite talks ever by Guy Steele. “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos” by Bryan Cantrill, the second-most popular one on the list, is very entertaining and needs to be watched many times (and at 0.75x…
SM, reminiscing I was 15 when I first came to the United States. Detroit. There was nothing worth eating in Detroit. Except fudge. And White Castle. And Cheetos.…
Wahyu Ichwandardi used MacPaint and Macromind VideoWorks/Director on an old Mac SE to create this wonderful frame-by-frame animation of “This is America”.…
Nick Murray Willis does brilliant “animated treatments” of commentary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyn067BJGEE…
Al Jazeera on godman Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCMFSkbom4A This is insane: Chauhan: One day the Guru summoned a meeting of his closest male devotees. There were about 400 to 500 people. He said “We are going to remove your virility. After that, your mind isn’t going t…
Astounding. No glue, 1 million Technic elements Total weight: 1,500 kg 5.3HP Engine 2,304 Power Functions motors 4,032 Technic gear wheels 2,016 Technic cross axles Est torque 92 Nm Functional rear spoiler and speedometer 13,438 man hours How they made it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtbYWN…
Kei Nomiyama and Radim Schreiber take otherworldly photos of fireflies. The latter will be at the Des Moines Botanical Center exhibiting his “Firefly Experience” https://vimeo.com/137033684…
She… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioH53m2cod4 made me feel like years of practicing this… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU were in vain. This guy attempts the ‘Pepin Omelette’ with fantastic results https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5__zptEU9vE and this chef is from another dimension (st…
From an old (2010) interview with Anand Wilder of Yeasayer PP: What do you think of South Asian artists who have also broken into indie/mainstream music success, like Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes), M.I.A., and yourself? Is there a different responsibility or consciousness involved with being South…
I slipped in a final question: Why in his autobiography did Popper say that he is the happiest philosopher he knows? “Most philosophers are really deeply depressed,” he replied, “because they can’t produce anything worthwhile.” Looking pleased with himself, Popper glanced over at Mrs. Mew, who wore…
Michael LaPointe writing for The Atlantic on The Pearl of Lao Tzu But elsewhere in the Miner letter, the curator terms the specimen a “pearlaceous growth,” and stresses that it ought not to be classified as a precious pearl. The gems we commonly know as pearls are formed within the organic tissue o…
Made a “Literary Clock” inspired by Jaap Meijer’s repurposing of an old Kindle. Might not be a bad use for an old iPad. Reminds me that I need to get Mark Formanek’s Standard Time onto a Raspberry Pi at some point. Update 08/24/18 There’s an app (of course)…
Saw this minor dis by Safari and then this video on the history of Java. Also by the author: something of a tribute to Flash (RIP.)…
Don’t think I could bear to watch the entire series but Vulture’s put together a few clips of Baron Cohen’s guests at “their most gullible” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czU_IkTDmMk…
There are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; h…
The 1.25s interval between each ‘tick’ in the background score of the water planet scenes1 in “Interstellar” indicates the passage of a single day on Earth. #theydidthemath See also: thalassophobia↩︎…
margin: 0; padding: 0; ... margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; ... sudo margin: 0 !important; sudo padding: 0 !important via @thebarrytone…
Excellent, short photoessay by Debarshi Mukherjee on Bonalu…
/misc/e/every-website-2018.mp4 Source…
The problem isn’t CPU power. The CPU on any modern PC is going to blow away the processing power of any sort of network switch you’d care to buy except the really high-end ones. (Really high end. So high end that unless you already know them by name you are not going to want to buy them) Offloading…
This project adds ligatures to Operator Mono, my favorite coding typeface 😍 Fira Code is also very beautiful and ships with ligatures…
“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4UZMHTjRA” 05/08/18 lol…
A mother in suburban Chicago breathes a huge sigh of relief this week, as she was reunited with her 8-year-old son Kevin, who was accidentally left at home alone as the family went on vacation to Paris. Apparently no one had noticed the boy was missing on their drive to the airport and through airp…
This will generate the incomparable Model M’s keyboard sounds “mainly for the purpose of annoying the hell out of” your coworkers. Sold 🙌 This is a beautiful and highly configurable application that emulates classic terminals. It also has a delightfully persuasive way of getting you to buy the full…
What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most…
XKCD. Add to the mix virtualenvwrapper pyenv pipenv pythonbrew Conda Then there’s Python’s packaging and distribution kerfuffle……
Peruse from time to time to learn more than ye olde {print $3}…
Line by Stefania Malmsten is 😍…
Love this work by Yuri Shwedoff! Via. Vanity Fair has an article on the illustrated edition of ASOIF.…
A 404, a 500, and another 500. By Steph Davidson.…
Enough said. (via Chad) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQC29joihwU…
From a Bloomberg article on frozen food: After a four-year slump, Kellogg Co., maker of Special K and Frosted Flakes, has returned to growth in recent quarters. That’s thanks in part to a boost from Eggos, which benefited from its prominence in the hit Netflix series “Stranger Things” as the favori…
When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of du…
It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort. Try the following potentially mortifying exercise in self-examination. Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: a rel…
XKCD IRL FTW. Sam Pizzey registered a company named ; DROP TABLE “COMPANIES”;-- LTD and wrote about it.…
More amazing work here and on Instagram. And a similar print for purchase.…
The calmest 9 minutes I spent today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpoMCAumhLg…
A tongue-in-cheek presentation on the Turing-Completeness of Powerpoint. This is some astounding PowerPoint-fu. Reminded me of the words of Linus Torvalds, “That is either genius, or a seriously diseased mind.” 😛…
When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming,” and finally he had to be sent off to bed, since Dick (alias Feynman) did not materialise. About half an hour lat…